About 5:30 p.m. on Thursday evening, Mar. 7, we lost internet at our house outside of Jefferson City. Internet outages are to be expected pretty much anywhere, and I did not think a whole lot about it, expecting it to be back in 30 minutes to an hour.
About 10 minutes after the outage I received a text message from CenturyLink on my phone verifying the outage, that its team was working on it, and I would receive further updates. Okay, no big deal. Then things went silent until around 7:30 p.m., when I got another update saying the estimate for service restoration was Friday at 6:00 p.m. This would amount to an outage of over 24 hours. This was getting serious. (It was also interesting since it hit about one hour before the President’s State of the Union address. Conspiracy theories, anyone?)
I tried various methods to contact CenturyLink using my cell phone. I made calls and got repetitious messages asking for my account information over and over again, and giving me the same canned line about updates. I went into several message chat sessions as well, and got nowhere. No one wanted to talk to me, and the messaging was just pathetic.
Friday morning, I was back at it. I eventually discovered that CenturyLink is owned by Lumen Technologies. I found links to phone numbers and emails for some individuals in Lumen’s media department and tried to reach out and make contact. In the meantime, I kept getting varying updates on the outage:
6:53 am: Service will be restored Friday at 10:40 am
8:42 am: Service will be restored Friday at 6:40 pm
10:57 am: Service will be restored Friday at 2:40 pm
Finally, at 11:03 am, I received an email reply from Kerry Zimmer, a senior lead communications manager at Lumen. Once again, it was “Can I get your account information and I will look into this?” Each time, I would indicate that I report for the Boulder Monitor and would really like to talk to someone about this, and gave my phone number. No call. Why was this so difficult? Fortunately, the email did include the Kerry’s phone number.
After some exchange of emails, Kerry did promise to get back to me when she had more info. By 2:00pm, after hearing nothing, I called her. Of course, she was just about to call me. No info on the outage, no reason why, waiting on the tech team. Can’t even say if it will be up by 6pm Friday. But she will keep me updated, even over the weekend.
Then the text updates continued:
2:40 pm: It’s taking our team longer than expected
2:55 pm: Service will be restored Saturday at 10:40 am
And then the killer:
5:57 pm: Service will be restored Monday at 6:42 pm
Really? What happened here? Now I’m out for the whole weekend plus all day Monday? I immediately emailed Kerry. I was not a happy customer. Of course, now it is after 6:00 p.m., so no response. Saturday morning was bad enough, but I thought I could hold off on some work I was doing until then. But then all of a sudden, it’s Monday evening? In the meantime, we were racking up overage charges on our cell phone plan for stuff that couldn’t wait. What a mess. What kind of outage takes four days to repair?
Saturday morning it was time to get proactive. I was at the Clancy Library at 9:00 a.m. when they opened. Did you know you can check out a Verizon Hotspot from the library? You can take this home, fire it up and connect your computer to the internet all with no charge or service fees, courtesy of Jefferson County. It’s not perfect, but it’s a great stop gap in a pinch. They only have a handful of these available, but I was lucky enough that they had one left on the shelf. I checked it out immediately, went home and fired it up and got back online. The speeds were really quite good.
It’s now 11:00 a.m. on Saturday morning, and I am putting the finishing touches on this column. At least I now know I have a usable form of internet connectivity for the next two weeks. (Thank you, North Jefferson County Public Library District!) There have been no new updates this morning. I don’t know how widespread the outage is. Kerry only said it was “in my area.” (Update: On Monday, afternoon, Kerry wrote: “Due to two fiber cuts by an unrelated contractor, internet services have been disrupted for some customers in Jefferson City, Montana. Our technicians are working now to repair the fiber and restore services. We will provide updates as our work progresses.”)
So, if you’re reading this column and you also experienced this outage, I would really like to know. Please leave a comment, and when this is all over I will follow up with whatever final information I can get from Kerry.
Roger Reynolds lives in Jefferson City.
